No RAM Latency for Wii U, According to Nano Assault Dev

The new device can be optimized in the coming years

Manfred Linzner, a developer working on Nano Assault for the upcoming Wii U home console, says that the new hardware platform from Nintendo will not suffer from performance issues linked to the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3.

Speaking to Not Enough Shaders the developer says, “The performance problem of hardware nowadays is not clock speed but ram latency. Fortunately Nintendo took great efforts to ensure developers can really work around that typical bottleneck on Wii U.”

He adds, “They put a lot of thought on how CPU, GPU, caches and memory controllers work together to amplify your code speed. For instance, with only some tiny changes we were able to optimize certain heavy load parts of the rendering pipeline to six times the original speed, and that was even without using any of the extra cores.”

Linzer says that Nintendo has been careful to make sure that screen screaming for the GamePad and the included camera do not affect performance in any way.

It seems that there’s also a lot of potential for optimizing the Wii U architecture in the coming years, which means that teams will be able to squeeze more performance out of the system as they become more familiar with it.

Nintendo says that, in pure performance terms, the Wii U is slightly more powerful than the PlayStation 3 from Sony and the Xbox 360 from Microsoft.

The company is also emphasizing the new gameplay options that are linked to the touch screen enabled GamePad controller.

Nano Assault Neo is set to be launched during the official launch window of the Nintendo Wii U.

The device will be offered to North American gamers on November 18, while those planning to get it in Europe will be able to buy it on November 30.